1
INTERVIEW WITH ART HAWKINS
BY MARK MADISON
MARCH 9, 2000
NCTC, Shepherdstown, WV
MR. MADISON: This is Mark Madison, the Fish and Wildlife Service Historian at
NCTC in Shepherdstown, WV on March 9, 2000. I am here with Art Hawkins, a former
Fish and Wildlife Service employee. He has agreed to do an oral history with us. I am
going to turn it over to Art, who has some notes.
MR. HAWKINS: Yes, Mark. I will start with my birth date, which was June 15, 1913.
I was born in Batavia, New York, which is between Buffalo and Rochester. I lived in a
small town that had quick access to the country. As a matter of fact, it was only two or
three blocks away from where we lived, so it was almost like living out in the country,
but, not quite. My cruising radius was limited to how far I could get with a bike, or on
foot, and still meet such obligations as going to school and running my paper route. We
never owned a car in my family. We never really needed one. My Dad could walk to
work, and shopping was easily done in those days with, in our case, three or four
groceries within easy walking distance. We could also order, and have things delivered,
free of charge. The milkman delivered to the house, and so did the iceman. My father
came from England at age eight.
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He was good at athletics. He played semi-pro baseball. He never hunted, and only fished
once or twice to my knowledge. My mother grew up in a rural atmosphere, but without
hunters in the family. My grandfather had hunted some in England, possibly as a
poacher, and he gave me my first gun. It was a single barrel, Lefevre, twelve-gauge
hammerless. My first game shot, as I recall, was a woodcock. By then I had an English
pointer named “Pep”. Together, one evening, we went hunting in a patch of aspens and
hawthornes, after one of my newspaper customers told me about seeing some strange
looking long-billed birds behind of their place. I recall shooting my first woodcock with a
30-inch, full choke, twelve-gauge gun using number four shot, which of course isn’t
exactly what is recommended. Another customer, named Fannie Brunson was a typical
little old lady in tennis shoes, and whenever I stopped to collect for the newspaper she
would show me pictures from the Reed’s Bird Guide. I then bought a copy. One Sunday
that must have been in May I went for a hike, and stumbled into a wave of migrating
warblers. By then my Mother had given me a pair of “two power” opera glasses. It was
really an awakening to me, to see this array of warblers, and identifying them, one by one,
in my bird book. I have been a “birder” ever since. Meanwhile, I went fishing and
camping at every opportunity. The place where we did most of our fishing was about
five miles away. We would peddle out there on our bicycles almost every evening. We
went to a place called “Godfrey’s Pond”. As a matter of fact, after school was out, Ernie
Haus and I put a tent there, and had it there all summer. We didn’t have to worry so
much about people stealing things in those days. In the fall, I ran a trap-line before
school. During Christmas vacation my first year at Cornell (1931), I trapped muskrats
3
with Arnold Keller. He was a taxidermist and a hunter, fisher and trapper sharing some of
his skills with me. One of the most memorable school days I can recall was the day that
the school closed during an ice storm. Arnold called to say that he and Mark Salway, the
local game warden, were going out to feed the pheasants, and “would you like to join us?”
“Would I, you bet I would”! We threw food, shelled corn, along some county roads for
the pheasants because their food plants were covered with ice. When the time came to go
to college, I enrolled at Cornell University’s Forestry School, which was closest to where
my interest lay, and the tuition was free. In those days there was no game management
program, or anything approaching it, except what you could pick up incidentally in
Biology. At the end of my second year at Cornell, the Forestry School was moved to
Syracuse, and by then, I was aware that Cornell had perhaps the strongest teaching staff
in the country in courses of field biology, so I changed to that curriculum. This was
perhaps the wisest decision ever made by me up to that time. It opened the door that
lead to Wisconsin and to Aldo Leopold.
Cornell provided some unique opportunities beyond course work. Under the NYA
program, which was the National Youth Administration during the 1930s, I worked under
Dr. Bill Hamilton on various mammal projects, for which I was paid fifty cents per hour.
On weekend and holidays, I worked on a major grouse research project, based at
Connecticut Hill, which is near Ithaca. The summer after graduation in 1934, I had my
first real job, with the New York state Conservation Department, working in a lake and
stream survey of the Mohawk-Hudson watershed. The summer before, I had helped
4
conduct a biological survey of the Tionesta forest in Pennsylvania. My big moment came
in November of 1934 after I had returned to Cornell to work on my “MS” under Dr.
Embody, in fisheries. One day, another advisor, Dr. Arthur Allen, called me into his
office. He had just received a letter from a new professor of game management at the
University of Wisconsin named Aldo Leopold. He asked if Dr. Allen had a student who
would be interested in conducting a quail study. The quail population had spread, over
the past two or three years, in Wisconsin, way outside of its usual range, sometimes
called irruption, due to a series of mild winters. He needed a graduate student who could
follow some sample populations and see what happened. He would provide a handsome
stipend of sixty dollars a month for me, with travel, as I pursued an advanced degree.
Times were hard in the 1930s, and I was running low on funds, so the proposal sounded
good, and I applied for the job. Leopold asked for one of my publications, but at the
time, I had none, so I sent him a term paper on the general subject of conservation, in my
handwriting. Professor Leopold must have been in a real bind for a student, because he
accepted me. I loaded up my secondhand Ford Model A Coupe, with all of my worldly
possessions, and right after Christmas, headed west over the narrow icy roads, arriving in
Madison on New Year’s Day of 1935, and was taken in by the Emlins, the only people I
knew out there. John Emlin and I had roomed together at Cornell the spring before. He
had taken his PhD., married that June, and moved to Madison to work with Leopold on a
government program dealing with sub-marginal lands. Johnny was based at the New Soils
building where Leopold was based. The next morning he directed me to Leopold’s office,
where I met Vivian Horn, Leopold’s secretary. Promptly at 8:30 Leopold’s office door
5
opened and I met my new boss, who welcomed me into his office as if I were some
dignitary. His desk was clear, and he left instructions with Miss Horn, not to be
interrupted. He outlined the quail situation, and what he hoped to learn about it. I am
sure that he learned a lot about me from my answers to his questions, put in such an
informal and friendly way. At noon, he insisted that I go home with him to lunch, and to
meet some of his family. I expected to go outside and jump into the car. But instead, we
walked a mile to his house, as was his practice. After lunch, he excused himself for a
short nap, while I chatted with Mrs. Leopold, and their daughters, Nina and Estella. We
walked back to the office where I was dismissed to get ready to start my fieldwork,
because time was wasting. This all happened on January 2, 1935, and it made a
tremendous impression on me. This impression never changed with respect to how
friendly Leopold was to people he met regardless of their status. Ten days after our
meeting Leopold had his 48th birthday. He took the next day off to visit his friend Ed
Ochsner at Prairie du Sac and together they took a drive along some rural roads familiar to
Ed. They spotted a worn out farm with only a chicken house still standing, and before
long it became known as “the Shack”, now known as the Mecca for conservationists,
worldwide. I established five quail study areas that winter. One of them was in Coon
Valley, in southwestern Wisconsin, which was the first Soil Erosion Service
demonstration area in the country. This project combined forestry, agriculture practices
and wildlife management.
MR. MADISON: I think he wrote about that. Didn’t Leopold reference Coon Valley?
6
MR. HAWKINS: Yes. My northernmost study area, the upper fringe of the quail range
at that time, was based at Babcock, near a C.C.C. [Civilian Conservation Corps] camp in
central Wisconsin. The other three areas that I chose to work on quail were closer to
Madison. One of them was Paul Errington’s quail study area at Prairie du Sac. Riley, and
Faville Grove, both near Madison, were the other two areas. I spent one of the early
weeks after I arrived in Wisconsin working with Franklin Schmidt. We worked on
banding prairie chickens near where the Hammerstroms later set up their long-term prairie
chicken study. Before we got well into the study however, weather conditions ended the
quail irruption, and my assignment changed. Professor Leopold decided that I could
better spend my time becoming manager of the Faville Grove Wildlife Experimental
Station, a training ground for new Leopold students, some of whom, including me,
conducted their research there.
MR. MADISON: How did you enter the Service?
MR. HAWKINS: After I got my degree under Leopold in Wisconsin, I got a job with the
Illinois Natural History Survey. I worked there for four years before going into the
military for another four and a half years. By then I was thinking about leaving the
Illinois Natural History Survey, and going into the Fish and Wildlife Service, for an
opportunity to study ducks in Canada, which I wanted to do. When I got out of the
military, Leopold insisted that I share his very limited office space at 424 University
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Farm Place, the building in which his whole department was housed. He didn’t charge the
government anything for having me housed there.
MR. MADISON: Great!
MR. HAWKINS: My part there was to help out with some of the students. I
participated in seminars and also worked with some of the grad students who were going
into the waterfowl field. At times when he was called out of town unexpectedly, I took
over some of his classes for him. I had three years with Leopold before he finally died.
After that I moved to the Region 3 office in Minneapolis. Although my supervision as a
flyway biologist was out of Washington, I was based in Region 3 because it was handy to
a lot of good waterfowl activity. I was also spending much of my time in Canada. I
actually spent about half the year in Canada during that period. I took my family with
me, and we based at Delta Waterfowl Research Station. I worked out from there. We had
a plane there, too. I shared time between aerial and ground transects. One of the things I
remember most about that period was the wonderful cooperation we had from the
Manitoba people. Jerry Malaher was the Game Branch Director at the time, and he was
wonderfully cooperative. If it hadn’t been for him, I wonder how the whole U.S.-
Canadian relations would have ended up, after having gotten off to a shaky start.
MR. MADISON: We did an interview with Morton Smith who had done some flying up
in Canada, and he said the same thing.
8
MR. HAWKINS: It was wonderful cooperation that we had. We took the family up
there for eight years, usually arriving at Delta in April, about the time the ducks were just
getting there. At this time, we were trying to develop a system for counting ducks on
breeding grounds. With a lot of cooperation from Delta Waterfowl research personnel, we
established some experimental transects where we compared what we saw on the ground
with what the aerial crew counted. We even tried canoe transects, versus aerial transects
to get some notion of relative visibility of different species on the ground versus in the air.
Then we established a grid system of running transects which followed east-west lines
with a width of one-eighth of a mile on either side of the path of the plane. Along these
transects we counted all of the ducks that fell on either side of the transect line. This is
the same system they use today. Before me, Bob Smith was the Mississippi Flyway
Biologist for the Fish and Wildlife Service. He then took up flying. After the war was
over, the Service acquired free airplanes from the military, including Stinson L-5’s, which
were observation planes during the war. Armed with this new way of counting ducks,
Bob left for Canada in his plane, while I drove his car. We met at Delta, and started our
work together, working closely with the Delta biologists. The following year, Dave
Spencer joined us in Manitoba. Dave was probably the most advanced in statistics of
any of us. He had taken a course in college, which the rest of us hadn’t. He had a copy
of Snedacor’s book on statistics, and taught us a lot about sampling procedures. This was
really the start of a statistical approach there, with the width of the transect one-eighth of
a mile, every four miles you advanced you would sample one square mile. Little by little,
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we divided the breeding grounds into units based on density of potholes, and the density
of the ducks. The sampling frequency differed, in these different units, depending on the
relative abundance of water, and duck density. Little by little the whole system evolved.
With a few modifications, it is pretty much the same today as it was then. Ground to air
comparisons also started early on. In these, one crew would beat out the transects on the
ground, and within 24 hours, the aerial crew would count over the same area. You then
had a direct comparison with what they saw, with what the ground crew saw. From
those figures, you could make adjustments to the duck population count. For example,
mallard and canvasbacks were very visible compared to teal. You might have a correction
factor of less than two for mallards or canvasbacks, but it could be as high as fifteen for
green winged teal. You had to take visibility differences into consideration in order to
come up with reasonably reliable figures. Ground-air comparisons are still being made
every year. They automatically adjust for differences in observer abilities. You can’t use
a “constant” from year to year because the visibility changes depending on whether or not
the aspen leaves have come out, and a whole lot of things like that. You have to make this
correction on an annual basis.
MR. MADISON: All right.
MR. HAWKINS: So, anyway at that early time, we were very much in the banding
mode too. We were trying to establish techniques for catching young ducks. Heavy
equipment gradually got better and easier to use, and finally became more efficient than
10
when we first started out. We put on some huge drives in some concentration areas
where there would be thousands of mostly adult male molting ducks. We were also
involved in things such as “die offs” due to things like botulism, and trying to do
something about that. We picked up sick ducks, or drove the birds away or whatever
seemed most appropriate. In early July, it was time to start surveys again to see how the
production was, in relation to breading pairs found in the spring. Late in the season, we
were still trying to catch more ducks to get them banded to see what flight lanes they
were taking out of Canada into the States, and also to see what flyways they affected
most. We were kept very busy, right up to the beginning of the hunting season. During
the hunting season, I usually went up to the Pas area of Manitoba, and started checking
ducks and geese that were taken by hunters, to obtain information on species shot, and to
get an idea of what the age ratio was. This was to see how many young ducks were being
produced and shot. My family and I remained in Canada until the opening of the hunting
season in the States. Then I would return home leaving my family there, and would work
as a flyway biologist through all the states of the Mississippi Flyway. I tried to time it
so that I would hit each state at about the beginning of the hunting season. At that time,
Patuxent was working on a method of collecting wings, and determining what the age ratio
was from the wing samples. At first, we weren’t able to age the birds. We went through
a series of years, checking techniques to determine the age of the birds by their wing
patterns. We finally became confident about obtaining actual figures on success rates by
species for any given year.
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MR. MADISON: Lets take a break.
MR. MADISON: You obviously met some interesting characters. Are there any
interesting incidents or colleagues that stick in your mind looking back on your time with
the Service?
MR. HAWKINS: It was very interesting to me, meeting some of these people that you
have heard about. They were bush pilots, and people of that type. There were Hudson
Bay trappers, or Conservation Officers that were up in the far north. These people were
all particularly interesting to me. I attended trappers’ meetings in The Pas, Manitoba and
Kenora, Ontario, and met a lot of the Indian trappers. They ran trap lines in their
assigned territories. In the summer, this was also their area to manage. It all worked out
very well. I had an opportunity to fly into the far north a few times with some of the
crews operating out of Churchill and along the coast of James Bay. One year, (1950) the
caribou were very late in their migration. We were up there around the first of July, and
ran into a terrific migration of caribou west of Churchill. I have no idea how many. But
on both sides of the plane, as far as you could see, there were caribou.
MR. MADISON: Wow! You could see that many?
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MR. HAWKINS: I think we were the first to discover the Eskimo Point nesting colony
for snow geese. This is now, I suppose, more than flourishing like all the rest! We ran
some transects into the far north looking for Whooping Cranes, and we also covered some
of the northern Ontario transects. I remember the first time that we tried a recording
device. Before that, it was a matter of putting all of your notes down on paper. You
would usually have a pad strapped to your knee to write down what you were seeing as
you were flying through. Then we heard about a new gadget called a wire recorder. I
remember that we outfitted Bob Smith’s amphibious plane, a Grumman Widgeon that
year, with a wire recorder. We flew a transect from Delta, Manitoba that took us way
into Ontario and back, I forget how many hours it was, but it was a long trip. When we
got back on the ground and turned on the wire recorder, nothing happened. So, Bob Smith
made a few choice remarks about that kind of equipment, turned on the recorder, and his
cuss words played back loud and clear but the rest of the wire was blank.
MR. MADISON: It just needed encouragement! [Both laughing]
MR. HAWKINS: Another time, that same year, I flew with Dave Spencer, in the L-5
equipped with a wire recorder. We had it hooked up, and not very far from Delta, smoke
started to gather in the cockpit. Dave was a very cool, Navy trained pilot. I remember
him saying, “Stand by with fire extinguisher!” That was shortly after WWII and there
were a lot of emergency landing fields around Canada. We put down at an emergency
field at Neepawa, and it turned out that it wasn’t anything serious, except for the smoke.
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After that, equipment came along pretty fast. Pretty quickly we had Dictaphones.
Johnny Lynch, another Service pilot-biologist operating in Saskatchewan was always
right up to date with the latest Dictaphones and other innovations.
MR. MADISON: We have one of the earlier computers. It’s an old Epson computer,
which was modified. It’s in a display now.
MR. HAWKINS: We had some pretty “early stage” equipment in those days. I
remember one time we put on a big duck drive at Whitewater Lake in Manitoba. We had
a big crew in there. There was one Widgeon that Walt Crissey was running. I think there
was a Sea-Bee in there too, plus two airboats. The drive was progressing very well. The
birds were coming to the nets and into the traps. About that time Bill Elder was making
lead poisoning studies on ducks, and he had a small blind, not very far away from the
mouth of the trap. He arrived just at the critical time, as the ducks were hitting the nets.
They all went over tops, and the whole drive failed.
MR. MADISON: Art, how long did you work for the Service? How many years?
MR. HAWKINS: Well, thirty years, counting my military time. Plus several extra years
on special assignments after retirement.
MR. MADISON: Thirty years?
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MR. HAWKINS: Then, after I retired I went back to special assignments for another ten
years such as editing the book Flyways, back in Canada working with ground to air
comparison crews, monitoring the oil spill on Laguna Madre, Texas, attending wing bees
and meetings, etc.
MR. MADISON: Were there any changes that struck you the most? I mean, personnel
or equipment changes.
MR. HAWKINS: The fellows that worked in Canada were extra special, easy to work
with and anxious to do what they could. This was an exciting period in the evolution of
management by flyways. Equipment and technique were in the early stages of
development. Everything seemed to have that post-World War II vigor.
MR. MADISON: What is the thing that you are most proud of doing in the U. S. Fish
and Wildlife Service? What did you feel best about?
MR. HAWKINS: That’s a tough question. I guess our pioneer work in Canada with
surveys, developing techniques for ageing ducks and working on the book Flyways stand
out the most. I got the most satisfaction from the Canadian work that I did. After I was
a flyway biologist, I became a Flyway Representative. From then on, it was mostly
working with the fourteen states in the Mississippi Flyway. I attended “umpteen
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thousand” meetings, mostly working with the technical group. We were trying to
coordinate projects that involved state personnel doing banding, and that sort of thing.
We were also involved with “wing bees” to measure duck production. This was all part
of the state/federal coordination. I was always in on the regulations meetings for the
whole time that I was in that position. I had the experience of seeing all that happens in
making the regulations. Those were usually very satisfying experiences. The Fish and
Wildlife Service has mostly dedicated people. A few people involved with flyway
management thought the Service was too restrictive. But they didn’t understand all the
problems regarding relative density of hunters and birds, various conditions, etc. There
wasn’t a one hundred percent agreement on everything by any means. Generally the
northern states, at that time, were very conservative while the southern states were just
the opposite. Often times, we ended up in the Mississippi Flyway with a seven to seven
tie vote on regulation matters, which was not helpful to the Service in making regulations.
MR. MADISON: Who decided the tiebreaker?
MR. HAWKINS: That was sort of worked out in committee, but at that time the Service
usually took a conservative position. In the early years, there was more of direct
communication with the front offices than is possible today. We had fewer personnel
than there are today. Regulations were always a “hot-button” issue. The central office
always needed to be kept advised so that they could answer all of the questions that were
16
coming in. There was pretty direct communication between the field people and the
central office in those early days.
I remember one time in the early years, right after the war, we still had wartime
equipment and vehicles. The gasoline in Canada was terrible, and our cars weren’t
operating properly so we started buying #1, instead of #2 grade gasoline. We
immediately got a response from the administrative offices that we had no authority to do
that. The difference was maybe five cents at the most. We were only paying forty-nine
cents, even up in Canada at the time, for a gallon of gas. It cost much more to send
telegrams back and forth. My first summer in Canada, (1946) my car was equipped with
wartime re-treads and Canadian roads were in terrible shape. Lyle Sorols from Delta and I
took a trip across the Canadian prairies to get better acquainted with the area in which we
were working to the Peau River in Alberta. During this several hundred-mile trip, we had
twenty flat tires!
MR. MADISON: Let me just ask you one more question, and then we’ll stop. Did you
notice any cultural differences with how the Canadians did their waterfowl work, or their
conservation work, as opposed to American efforts?
MR. HAWKINS: There were some differences I suppose. But I always found the
Canadians to be delightful people to work with. They just went out of their way to be
cooperative it seemed to me. So I would have nothing but good things to say about
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working with the Canadians. It was a pleasure to do it. My whole family looked forward
to going up to Canada for the summer. We have made return trips there in just the last
few years to renew some old friendships.
MR. MADISON: Do you think that these joint efforts are still going on as often as they
did back in those days?
MR. HAWKINS: I started my work in Canada in 1946, and I kind of lost track. And
then we were up there three years ago. In 1996 I celebrated my 50th return to the area. I
talked to some of our personnel working there at the time, and they talk the same language
as we talked fifty years earlier. Those things don’t seem to change. The people working
there now seem just as well qualified as they did before, even though we’ve had these big
questions in the past couple of years about where all the ducks are. I have no very good
answer for that except that the conditions in Canada have changed so much in terms of big
reservoirs and feeding areas that bird distribution in place and time may have changed too.
We have also had weather patterns that held the birds north for a longer period of time. I
think that these changes have something to do with the discrepancy between what people
have been seeing and what we have been predicting.
MR. MADISON: Well Art, thank you very, very much. It was a wonderful interview!
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1
INTERVIEW WITH ART HAWKINS
BY MARK MADISON
MARCH 9, 2000
NCTC, Shepherdstown, WV
MR. MADISON: This is Mark Madison, the Fish and Wildlife Service Historian at
NCTC in Shepherdstown, WV on March 9, 2000. I am here with Art Hawkins, a former
Fish and Wildlife Service employee. He has agreed to do an oral history with us. I am
going to turn it over to Art, who has some notes.
MR. HAWKINS: Yes, Mark. I will start with my birth date, which was June 15, 1913.
I was born in Batavia, New York, which is between Buffalo and Rochester. I lived in a
small town that had quick access to the country. As a matter of fact, it was only two or
three blocks away from where we lived, so it was almost like living out in the country,
but, not quite. My cruising radius was limited to how far I could get with a bike, or on
foot, and still meet such obligations as going to school and running my paper route. We
never owned a car in my family. We never really needed one. My Dad could walk to
work, and shopping was easily done in those days with, in our case, three or four
groceries within easy walking distance. We could also order, and have things delivered,
free of charge. The milkman delivered to the house, and so did the iceman. My father
came from England at age eight.
2
He was good at athletics. He played semi-pro baseball. He never hunted, and only fished
once or twice to my knowledge. My mother grew up in a rural atmosphere, but without
hunters in the family. My grandfather had hunted some in England, possibly as a
poacher, and he gave me my first gun. It was a single barrel, Lefevre, twelve-gauge
hammerless. My first game shot, as I recall, was a woodcock. By then I had an English
pointer named “Pep”. Together, one evening, we went hunting in a patch of aspens and
hawthornes, after one of my newspaper customers told me about seeing some strange
looking long-billed birds behind of their place. I recall shooting my first woodcock with a
30-inch, full choke, twelve-gauge gun using number four shot, which of course isn’t
exactly what is recommended. Another customer, named Fannie Brunson was a typical
little old lady in tennis shoes, and whenever I stopped to collect for the newspaper she
would show me pictures from the Reed’s Bird Guide. I then bought a copy. One Sunday
that must have been in May I went for a hike, and stumbled into a wave of migrating
warblers. By then my Mother had given me a pair of “two power” opera glasses. It was
really an awakening to me, to see this array of warblers, and identifying them, one by one,
in my bird book. I have been a “birder” ever since. Meanwhile, I went fishing and
camping at every opportunity. The place where we did most of our fishing was about
five miles away. We would peddle out there on our bicycles almost every evening. We
went to a place called “Godfrey’s Pond”. As a matter of fact, after school was out, Ernie
Haus and I put a tent there, and had it there all summer. We didn’t have to worry so
much about people stealing things in those days. In the fall, I ran a trap-line before
school. During Christmas vacation my first year at Cornell (1931), I trapped muskrats
3
with Arnold Keller. He was a taxidermist and a hunter, fisher and trapper sharing some of
his skills with me. One of the most memorable school days I can recall was the day that
the school closed during an ice storm. Arnold called to say that he and Mark Salway, the
local game warden, were going out to feed the pheasants, and “would you like to join us?”
“Would I, you bet I would”! We threw food, shelled corn, along some county roads for
the pheasants because their food plants were covered with ice. When the time came to go
to college, I enrolled at Cornell University’s Forestry School, which was closest to where
my interest lay, and the tuition was free. In those days there was no game management
program, or anything approaching it, except what you could pick up incidentally in
Biology. At the end of my second year at Cornell, the Forestry School was moved to
Syracuse, and by then, I was aware that Cornell had perhaps the strongest teaching staff
in the country in courses of field biology, so I changed to that curriculum. This was
perhaps the wisest decision ever made by me up to that time. It opened the door that
lead to Wisconsin and to Aldo Leopold.
Cornell provided some unique opportunities beyond course work. Under the NYA
program, which was the National Youth Administration during the 1930s, I worked under
Dr. Bill Hamilton on various mammal projects, for which I was paid fifty cents per hour.
On weekend and holidays, I worked on a major grouse research project, based at
Connecticut Hill, which is near Ithaca. The summer after graduation in 1934, I had my
first real job, with the New York state Conservation Department, working in a lake and
stream survey of the Mohawk-Hudson watershed. The summer before, I had helped
4
conduct a biological survey of the Tionesta forest in Pennsylvania. My big moment came
in November of 1934 after I had returned to Cornell to work on my “MS” under Dr.
Embody, in fisheries. One day, another advisor, Dr. Arthur Allen, called me into his
office. He had just received a letter from a new professor of game management at the
University of Wisconsin named Aldo Leopold. He asked if Dr. Allen had a student who
would be interested in conducting a quail study. The quail population had spread, over
the past two or three years, in Wisconsin, way outside of its usual range, sometimes
called irruption, due to a series of mild winters. He needed a graduate student who could
follow some sample populations and see what happened. He would provide a handsome
stipend of sixty dollars a month for me, with travel, as I pursued an advanced degree.
Times were hard in the 1930s, and I was running low on funds, so the proposal sounded
good, and I applied for the job. Leopold asked for one of my publications, but at the
time, I had none, so I sent him a term paper on the general subject of conservation, in my
handwriting. Professor Leopold must have been in a real bind for a student, because he
accepted me. I loaded up my secondhand Ford Model A Coupe, with all of my worldly
possessions, and right after Christmas, headed west over the narrow icy roads, arriving in
Madison on New Year’s Day of 1935, and was taken in by the Emlins, the only people I
knew out there. John Emlin and I had roomed together at Cornell the spring before. He
had taken his PhD., married that June, and moved to Madison to work with Leopold on a
government program dealing with sub-marginal lands. Johnny was based at the New Soils
building where Leopold was based. The next morning he directed me to Leopold’s office,
where I met Vivian Horn, Leopold’s secretary. Promptly at 8:30 Leopold’s office door
5
opened and I met my new boss, who welcomed me into his office as if I were some
dignitary. His desk was clear, and he left instructions with Miss Horn, not to be
interrupted. He outlined the quail situation, and what he hoped to learn about it. I am
sure that he learned a lot about me from my answers to his questions, put in such an
informal and friendly way. At noon, he insisted that I go home with him to lunch, and to
meet some of his family. I expected to go outside and jump into the car. But instead, we
walked a mile to his house, as was his practice. After lunch, he excused himself for a
short nap, while I chatted with Mrs. Leopold, and their daughters, Nina and Estella. We
walked back to the office where I was dismissed to get ready to start my fieldwork,
because time was wasting. This all happened on January 2, 1935, and it made a
tremendous impression on me. This impression never changed with respect to how
friendly Leopold was to people he met regardless of their status. Ten days after our
meeting Leopold had his 48th birthday. He took the next day off to visit his friend Ed
Ochsner at Prairie du Sac and together they took a drive along some rural roads familiar to
Ed. They spotted a worn out farm with only a chicken house still standing, and before
long it became known as “the Shack”, now known as the Mecca for conservationists,
worldwide. I established five quail study areas that winter. One of them was in Coon
Valley, in southwestern Wisconsin, which was the first Soil Erosion Service
demonstration area in the country. This project combined forestry, agriculture practices
and wildlife management.
MR. MADISON: I think he wrote about that. Didn’t Leopold reference Coon Valley?
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MR. HAWKINS: Yes. My northernmost study area, the upper fringe of the quail range
at that time, was based at Babcock, near a C.C.C. [Civilian Conservation Corps] camp in
central Wisconsin. The other three areas that I chose to work on quail were closer to
Madison. One of them was Paul Errington’s quail study area at Prairie du Sac. Riley, and
Faville Grove, both near Madison, were the other two areas. I spent one of the early
weeks after I arrived in Wisconsin working with Franklin Schmidt. We worked on
banding prairie chickens near where the Hammerstroms later set up their long-term prairie
chicken study. Before we got well into the study however, weather conditions ended the
quail irruption, and my assignment changed. Professor Leopold decided that I could
better spend my time becoming manager of the Faville Grove Wildlife Experimental
Station, a training ground for new Leopold students, some of whom, including me,
conducted their research there.
MR. MADISON: How did you enter the Service?
MR. HAWKINS: After I got my degree under Leopold in Wisconsin, I got a job with the
Illinois Natural History Survey. I worked there for four years before going into the
military for another four and a half years. By then I was thinking about leaving the
Illinois Natural History Survey, and going into the Fish and Wildlife Service, for an
opportunity to study ducks in Canada, which I wanted to do. When I got out of the
military, Leopold insisted that I share his very limited office space at 424 University
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Farm Place, the building in which his whole department was housed. He didn’t charge the
government anything for having me housed there.
MR. MADISON: Great!
MR. HAWKINS: My part there was to help out with some of the students. I
participated in seminars and also worked with some of the grad students who were going
into the waterfowl field. At times when he was called out of town unexpectedly, I took
over some of his classes for him. I had three years with Leopold before he finally died.
After that I moved to the Region 3 office in Minneapolis. Although my supervision as a
flyway biologist was out of Washington, I was based in Region 3 because it was handy to
a lot of good waterfowl activity. I was also spending much of my time in Canada. I
actually spent about half the year in Canada during that period. I took my family with
me, and we based at Delta Waterfowl Research Station. I worked out from there. We had
a plane there, too. I shared time between aerial and ground transects. One of the things I
remember most about that period was the wonderful cooperation we had from the
Manitoba people. Jerry Malaher was the Game Branch Director at the time, and he was
wonderfully cooperative. If it hadn’t been for him, I wonder how the whole U.S.-
Canadian relations would have ended up, after having gotten off to a shaky start.
MR. MADISON: We did an interview with Morton Smith who had done some flying up
in Canada, and he said the same thing.
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MR. HAWKINS: It was wonderful cooperation that we had. We took the family up
there for eight years, usually arriving at Delta in April, about the time the ducks were just
getting there. At this time, we were trying to develop a system for counting ducks on
breeding grounds. With a lot of cooperation from Delta Waterfowl research personnel, we
established some experimental transects where we compared what we saw on the ground
with what the aerial crew counted. We even tried canoe transects, versus aerial transects
to get some notion of relative visibility of different species on the ground versus in the air.
Then we established a grid system of running transects which followed east-west lines
with a width of one-eighth of a mile on either side of the path of the plane. Along these
transects we counted all of the ducks that fell on either side of the transect line. This is
the same system they use today. Before me, Bob Smith was the Mississippi Flyway
Biologist for the Fish and Wildlife Service. He then took up flying. After the war was
over, the Service acquired free airplanes from the military, including Stinson L-5’s, which
were observation planes during the war. Armed with this new way of counting ducks,
Bob left for Canada in his plane, while I drove his car. We met at Delta, and started our
work together, working closely with the Delta biologists. The following year, Dave
Spencer joined us in Manitoba. Dave was probably the most advanced in statistics of
any of us. He had taken a course in college, which the rest of us hadn’t. He had a copy
of Snedacor’s book on statistics, and taught us a lot about sampling procedures. This was
really the start of a statistical approach there, with the width of the transect one-eighth of
a mile, every four miles you advanced you would sample one square mile. Little by little,
9
we divided the breeding grounds into units based on density of potholes, and the density
of the ducks. The sampling frequency differed, in these different units, depending on the
relative abundance of water, and duck density. Little by little the whole system evolved.
With a few modifications, it is pretty much the same today as it was then. Ground to air
comparisons also started early on. In these, one crew would beat out the transects on the
ground, and within 24 hours, the aerial crew would count over the same area. You then
had a direct comparison with what they saw, with what the ground crew saw. From
those figures, you could make adjustments to the duck population count. For example,
mallard and canvasbacks were very visible compared to teal. You might have a correction
factor of less than two for mallards or canvasbacks, but it could be as high as fifteen for
green winged teal. You had to take visibility differences into consideration in order to
come up with reasonably reliable figures. Ground-air comparisons are still being made
every year. They automatically adjust for differences in observer abilities. You can’t use
a “constant” from year to year because the visibility changes depending on whether or not
the aspen leaves have come out, and a whole lot of things like that. You have to make this
correction on an annual basis.
MR. MADISON: All right.
MR. HAWKINS: So, anyway at that early time, we were very much in the banding
mode too. We were trying to establish techniques for catching young ducks. Heavy
equipment gradually got better and easier to use, and finally became more efficient than
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when we first started out. We put on some huge drives in some concentration areas
where there would be thousands of mostly adult male molting ducks. We were also
involved in things such as “die offs” due to things like botulism, and trying to do
something about that. We picked up sick ducks, or drove the birds away or whatever
seemed most appropriate. In early July, it was time to start surveys again to see how the
production was, in relation to breading pairs found in the spring. Late in the season, we
were still trying to catch more ducks to get them banded to see what flight lanes they
were taking out of Canada into the States, and also to see what flyways they affected
most. We were kept very busy, right up to the beginning of the hunting season. During
the hunting season, I usually went up to the Pas area of Manitoba, and started checking
ducks and geese that were taken by hunters, to obtain information on species shot, and to
get an idea of what the age ratio was. This was to see how many young ducks were being
produced and shot. My family and I remained in Canada until the opening of the hunting
season in the States. Then I would return home leaving my family there, and would work
as a flyway biologist through all the states of the Mississippi Flyway. I tried to time it
so that I would hit each state at about the beginning of the hunting season. At that time,
Patuxent was working on a method of collecting wings, and determining what the age ratio
was from the wing samples. At first, we weren’t able to age the birds. We went through
a series of years, checking techniques to determine the age of the birds by their wing
patterns. We finally became confident about obtaining actual figures on success rates by
species for any given year.
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MR. MADISON: Lets take a break.
MR. MADISON: You obviously met some interesting characters. Are there any
interesting incidents or colleagues that stick in your mind looking back on your time with
the Service?
MR. HAWKINS: It was very interesting to me, meeting some of these people that you
have heard about. They were bush pilots, and people of that type. There were Hudson
Bay trappers, or Conservation Officers that were up in the far north. These people were
all particularly interesting to me. I attended trappers’ meetings in The Pas, Manitoba and
Kenora, Ontario, and met a lot of the Indian trappers. They ran trap lines in their
assigned territories. In the summer, this was also their area to manage. It all worked out
very well. I had an opportunity to fly into the far north a few times with some of the
crews operating out of Churchill and along the coast of James Bay. One year, (1950) the
caribou were very late in their migration. We were up there around the first of July, and
ran into a terrific migration of caribou west of Churchill. I have no idea how many. But
on both sides of the plane, as far as you could see, there were caribou.
MR. MADISON: Wow! You could see that many?
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MR. HAWKINS: I think we were the first to discover the Eskimo Point nesting colony
for snow geese. This is now, I suppose, more than flourishing like all the rest! We ran
some transects into the far north looking for Whooping Cranes, and we also covered some
of the northern Ontario transects. I remember the first time that we tried a recording
device. Before that, it was a matter of putting all of your notes down on paper. You
would usually have a pad strapped to your knee to write down what you were seeing as
you were flying through. Then we heard about a new gadget called a wire recorder. I
remember that we outfitted Bob Smith’s amphibious plane, a Grumman Widgeon that
year, with a wire recorder. We flew a transect from Delta, Manitoba that took us way
into Ontario and back, I forget how many hours it was, but it was a long trip. When we
got back on the ground and turned on the wire recorder, nothing happened. So, Bob Smith
made a few choice remarks about that kind of equipment, turned on the recorder, and his
cuss words played back loud and clear but the rest of the wire was blank.
MR. MADISON: It just needed encouragement! [Both laughing]
MR. HAWKINS: Another time, that same year, I flew with Dave Spencer, in the L-5
equipped with a wire recorder. We had it hooked up, and not very far from Delta, smoke
started to gather in the cockpit. Dave was a very cool, Navy trained pilot. I remember
him saying, “Stand by with fire extinguisher!” That was shortly after WWII and there
were a lot of emergency landing fields around Canada. We put down at an emergency
field at Neepawa, and it turned out that it wasn’t anything serious, except for the smoke.
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After that, equipment came along pretty fast. Pretty quickly we had Dictaphones.
Johnny Lynch, another Service pilot-biologist operating in Saskatchewan was always
right up to date with the latest Dictaphones and other innovations.
MR. MADISON: We have one of the earlier computers. It’s an old Epson computer,
which was modified. It’s in a display now.
MR. HAWKINS: We had some pretty “early stage” equipment in those days. I
remember one time we put on a big duck drive at Whitewater Lake in Manitoba. We had
a big crew in there. There was one Widgeon that Walt Crissey was running. I think there
was a Sea-Bee in there too, plus two airboats. The drive was progressing very well. The
birds were coming to the nets and into the traps. About that time Bill Elder was making
lead poisoning studies on ducks, and he had a small blind, not very far away from the
mouth of the trap. He arrived just at the critical time, as the ducks were hitting the nets.
They all went over tops, and the whole drive failed.
MR. MADISON: Art, how long did you work for the Service? How many years?
MR. HAWKINS: Well, thirty years, counting my military time. Plus several extra years
on special assignments after retirement.
MR. MADISON: Thirty years?
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MR. HAWKINS: Then, after I retired I went back to special assignments for another ten
years such as editing the book Flyways, back in Canada working with ground to air
comparison crews, monitoring the oil spill on Laguna Madre, Texas, attending wing bees
and meetings, etc.
MR. MADISON: Were there any changes that struck you the most? I mean, personnel
or equipment changes.
MR. HAWKINS: The fellows that worked in Canada were extra special, easy to work
with and anxious to do what they could. This was an exciting period in the evolution of
management by flyways. Equipment and technique were in the early stages of
development. Everything seemed to have that post-World War II vigor.
MR. MADISON: What is the thing that you are most proud of doing in the U. S. Fish
and Wildlife Service? What did you feel best about?
MR. HAWKINS: That’s a tough question. I guess our pioneer work in Canada with
surveys, developing techniques for ageing ducks and working on the book Flyways stand
out the most. I got the most satisfaction from the Canadian work that I did. After I was
a flyway biologist, I became a Flyway Representative. From then on, it was mostly
working with the fourteen states in the Mississippi Flyway. I attended “umpteen
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thousand” meetings, mostly working with the technical group. We were trying to
coordinate projects that involved state personnel doing banding, and that sort of thing.
We were also involved with “wing bees” to measure duck production. This was all part
of the state/federal coordination. I was always in on the regulations meetings for the
whole time that I was in that position. I had the experience of seeing all that happens in
making the regulations. Those were usually very satisfying experiences. The Fish and
Wildlife Service has mostly dedicated people. A few people involved with flyway
management thought the Service was too restrictive. But they didn’t understand all the
problems regarding relative density of hunters and birds, various conditions, etc. There
wasn’t a one hundred percent agreement on everything by any means. Generally the
northern states, at that time, were very conservative while the southern states were just
the opposite. Often times, we ended up in the Mississippi Flyway with a seven to seven
tie vote on regulation matters, which was not helpful to the Service in making regulations.
MR. MADISON: Who decided the tiebreaker?
MR. HAWKINS: That was sort of worked out in committee, but at that time the Service
usually took a conservative position. In the early years, there was more of direct
communication with the front offices than is possible today. We had fewer personnel
than there are today. Regulations were always a “hot-button” issue. The central office
always needed to be kept advised so that they could answer all of the questions that were
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coming in. There was pretty direct communication between the field people and the
central office in those early days.
I remember one time in the early years, right after the war, we still had wartime
equipment and vehicles. The gasoline in Canada was terrible, and our cars weren’t
operating properly so we started buying #1, instead of #2 grade gasoline. We
immediately got a response from the administrative offices that we had no authority to do
that. The difference was maybe five cents at the most. We were only paying forty-nine
cents, even up in Canada at the time, for a gallon of gas. It cost much more to send
telegrams back and forth. My first summer in Canada, (1946) my car was equipped with
wartime re-treads and Canadian roads were in terrible shape. Lyle Sorols from Delta and I
took a trip across the Canadian prairies to get better acquainted with the area in which we
were working to the Peau River in Alberta. During this several hundred-mile trip, we had
twenty flat tires!
MR. MADISON: Let me just ask you one more question, and then we’ll stop. Did you
notice any cultural differences with how the Canadians did their waterfowl work, or their
conservation work, as opposed to American efforts?
MR. HAWKINS: There were some differences I suppose. But I always found the
Canadians to be delightful people to work with. They just went out of their way to be
cooperative it seemed to me. So I would have nothing but good things to say about
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working with the Canadians. It was a pleasure to do it. My whole family looked forward
to going up to Canada for the summer. We have made return trips there in just the last
few years to renew some old friendships.
MR. MADISON: Do you think that these joint efforts are still going on as often as they
did back in those days?
MR. HAWKINS: I started my work in Canada in 1946, and I kind of lost track. And
then we were up there three years ago. In 1996 I celebrated my 50th return to the area. I
talked to some of our personnel working there at the time, and they talk the same language
as we talked fifty years earlier. Those things don’t seem to change. The people working
there now seem just as well qualified as they did before, even though we’ve had these big
questions in the past couple of years about where all the ducks are. I have no very good
answer for that except that the conditions in Canada have changed so much in terms of big
reservoirs and feeding areas that bird distribution in place and time may have changed too.
We have also had weather patterns that held the birds north for a longer period of time. I
think that these changes have something to do with the discrepancy between what people
have been seeing and what we have been predicting.
MR. MADISON: Well Art, thank you very, very much. It was a wonderful interview!
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